Deeplinks Blog posts about International

The campaign of attacks targeting Syrian opposition activists on the Internet continues to intensify. Since the beginning of the year, Syrian opposition activists have been targeted using severalTrojans, which covertly install spying software onto the infected computer, as well as phishing attacks which steal YouTube and Facebook login credentials.

On Monday, President Obama, in a speech at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, announced new measures to help curb human rights violations by the Syrian and Iranian governments. These measures include an executive order targeting people and companies facilitating human-rights abuses with technology, as well as a set of “challenge grants” that would fund companies to help create new technologies for the purpose of warning citizens in countries where mass killings may occur.

According to a report from Ma’an News published today, the Palestinian Authority has ordered the blocking of websites belonging to eight news outlets critical of President Mahmoud Abbas. The report states that technicians at PalTel—the largest ISP in the West Bank—tweaked their proxy server and web cache daemon to block the sites, while other ISPs are using similar setups. The blocking is inconsistent across ISPs, with at least one failing to block certain sites on the list.

The blocked sites—which Ma’an discovered with the help of a new project, the Open Observatory of Network Interference, founded by Jacob Appelbaum and Arturo Filasto—include the following sites:

The Islamic Republic of Iran has recently become notorious for its efforts to create a “halal” Internet. This week, a security researcher found that Iranian authorities published a “Request for Information” (RFI) seeking details on new types of censorship tools that are available in the market. Ars Technica reported that the Persian language RFI calls for “proper conditions for domestic experts in order to build a healthy Web and organize the current filtering situation.” The deadline for response was yesterday, April 19.

Thai journalist Chiranuch Premchaiporn, better know by her pen name Jiew, is awaiting an April 30th court verdict that could sentence her to years in prison for violating Thailand’s draconian crackdown against free speech. Jiew’s case has focused international attention on Thailand’s lèse majesté laws, which have been used to block websites and suppress political dissent. The ruling will help clarify liability for Internet intermediaries such as Jiew, who is the director of the popular Prachatai news site.